Transcript

Andrew Ford: It's time to turn our attention to Les Murray and the Song Company, and we do it via the Elizabethan period, because not only does this Song Company concert contain contemporary settings of Les Murray's poetry, it also contains some madrigals. And on the most beautiful and indeed wordiest of madrigals is Thomas Wilkes' 'Thule, the Period of Cosmography'. Before we hear it, I'm actually going to read you a little bit of this because the words are so extraordinary and what Wilkes does with them is extraordinary; and so is the comparison that is in the poetry, 'Thule the Period of Cosmography', I'll try and read it correctly as well.

'Thule, the Period of Cosmography

Doth vaunt of Hecla

Whose sulphureous fire doth melt the frozen clime

And thaw the sky.

Trinacrian Etna's flames ascend not higher.

These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I,

Whose heart with fear doth freeze,

With love doth fry.'

Andrew Ford: And it's a great pleasure to welcome to The Music Show now, The Song Company, and their director, Roland Pealman, and the poet, Les Murray. Welcome Les.

Les Murray: Oh, thank you, yes.

Andrew Ford: Can we begin perhaps with the sort of general question about you and music? I mean does music feature a lot in your life?

Les Murray: I guess so. I'm married to it. My wife's very musical, and some of the family are, and I think all of the Murrays believe that music was the art that mattered. I've always had rather a poor ear I think and tried to make music out of words. But I have this instinct to stretch words out to the edge, where they start crumbling away in music.

Andrew Ford: Well it's interesting. One of the poems certainly that is being sung, does that beautifully, Bats Ultrasound, where it actually turns into bat language, in a way.

Les Murray: Yes.

Andrew Ford: But all poetry in fact is in danger of doing that all the time, don't you think? That it becomes a kind of music?

Les Murray: Oh yes, I'd love to write a good song, and particularly a good hymn before I check out of this profession. But yes, we're all hovering on the edge of music, we're always hovering on the edge of all the other arts I guess. Dance, for one; a lot of dance underlies poetry. And painting, which is another one I really thought I could do, and couldn't. But yes, I'll read you Bats Ultrasound if you like.

Andrew Ford: Well I was actually going to ask you to save that one up, because I'd quite like you to read that before The Song Company sing it, so that we can do an A/B comparison. But I do want you to read something for us. You've got Newcastle Rounds there, perhaps you could read that one for us?

Les Murray: Most certainly. Yes, this came out of the first show that The Song Company and I did together, and they commissioned this and I had great fun with it, because Newcastle's my mother's town, it's the first city I ever saw, I'm very fond of the place, and it sort of composed itself.

'The Newcastle Rounds.

Tall sails went slack so high did Nobby stand,

So they filled him in the surf to choke on sand,

And convicts naked as legs in trousers

Tunnelled for coal way below the houses.

Workers got wages and the co-op store,

Wearing bowler hats as they waltzed through the door.

They danced in pumps and they struck with banners,

And they ran us up the city with bands and spanners.

When Essington Lewis blew through his name,

Steel ran in rivers, coke marched in flame.

Wharfies handled wire rope bloody with jags,

And took their hands home in Gladstone bags.

Then the town break-danced on earthquake feet,

And tottered on crutches down every street.

We all sniffed coke back then, for pay,

But the city came up stately when the smoke blew away.

With horses up the valley and wines flowing down,

Clinking their glasses as a health to the town,

Freighters queued off the port at all times

From pub to art show became a social sway.

The original people got a corner of a say

And the ocean spoke to surfers in loud mouthed rhymes.'

Andrew Ford: Beautiful. That's a very good example, Les Murray, of a poem which has dance behind it.

Les Murray: Oh yes. I enjoyed it the day they first sang it, they started singing it in larger and larger rounds, you know, more and more people in circles. Sort of spiralling and then peeling off into the hall, it was lovely to watch.

Andrew Ford: But it makes you want to move to it; it reminds me of that John Masefield 'Cargoes' with such a strong sense of rhythm.

Les Murray: Yes.

Andrew Ford: What you do with rhythm I suppose is you can either decide to make the rhythm obvious like in the one we've heard, or to conceal it.

Les Murray: You can. One of the things I do is to fish out occasions of music that occur in real life, sort of wild music, if you like. I'll read you a little short example of that, if you like.

Andrew Ford: Yes, please.

Les Murray: It's called Pop Music.

'Empty as a country town street after five,

Two or three crisp, high-heeled walkers

And a pair of little girls in a station wagon,

One bunging a pop bottle, boink! against her head

And bok! against the wagon.

The other blows music into hers,

Do-roh-to-hoe-soon, but no-throw-for-woe-yet-moon.'

Andrew Ford: My guest is Les Murray who I'm beginning to think should be my guest every week, and who's on this show because his words are being sung by The Song Company. A number of composers have set them to music. How do you feel about that, Les?

Les Murray: Oh, it's a new experience. The first time it happened was a year or two ago when I went off to New York to hear it done at the Guggenheim, not by The Song Company but by a group of different people, and I was a bit overwhelmed, I was a bit horrified in some cases. The music was way above my head you see, it was far more sophisticated than I am. Although one chap just sang one of the songs as a blues to the piano, and that's what I was expecting the whole thing would be, you know. But I sort of fiddled my way through it and faked it and read poems and amused the audience in between the high art. But then I came home and I found this much more congenial people, The Song Company, who are warm and good-hearted and have three throats each I think, they're absolute geniuses, they can do anything.

Andrew Ford: When you hear your words sung, does it make you think differently about the poems themselves?

Les Murray: No, it makes me think about music and try to understand it. I've got my idea of the poems and this goes way out there, and it takes them into space that I'm not sure I can fly there, you know.

Andrew Ford: You have already put music in the poems.

Les Murray: I thought I did, yes. Other people found more in there.

Andrew Ford: But the composer then has to be careful not to do to the poem what the poet's already done, in a sense. So really that leaves only one direction to go, which is the opposite direction.

Les Murray: I think a lot of musicians believe in music and the text and step off from it and go into space, you know. I think the words are an occasion for their thing, and I thoroughly understand that.

Andrew Ford: Roland Peelman, are you there?

Roland Peelman: I am, certainly here.

Andrew Ford: Good. Look tell us about The Song Company's involvement in the poetry of Les Murray; when did it start?

Roland Peelman: Well I have to say I always felt like I didn't have to do very much about it, and it sort of came about through many circumstances. The fact that Guggenheim had done this project last year, and that I found out about it, of course, and I listened to it. Also the fact that a composer in Denmark whom we had commissioned to write a piece for us back in '98/'99, eventually fell upon the poetry of Les, of all people. He'd make the first decision to write madrigals for us, and then in order to find a text, Les' volume, Translations from the Natural World, came to his attention. And as you may know, Andy, Les' work is very well known in Denmark, they're real Les Murray scholars over there, it has been translated over there, etc. Les has, as far as I know, you've been there, haven't you Les, a few times?

Les Murray: Many times. It's one of the best places in the world to study Australian literature. Believe it or not.

Roland Pealman: So anyhow, this composer called Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen chose two texts by Les to set to music, and they arrived in our mailbox at some point early last year. And the first time I saw them I was absolutely, utterly overwhelmed, and I hope Pelle will set a few more, as a matter of fact.

Andrew Ford: He's a very good composer, isn't he?

Roland Pealman: Oh, he's extraordinary. He's really one of the top composers in Denmark and it's only lately I think that sort of international interest is growing into his work, because he's very much an odd case in Denmark, he doesn't really fit the traditional scene there.

Andrew Ford: Well I'd like to hear his piece now, which is his setting of Bats Ultrasound, so how would it be if Les were to read the poem and then The Song Company were to sing Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's setting of it. Would you be able to manage that for us?

Andrew Ford: Fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for that. That was Bats Ultrasound, words by Les Murray and music by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, from Denmark, and he's one of the composers of the music which is going to be heard in the concert tonight. The others are Damien Ricketson from Australia, Gulio Castagnoli from Italy and Jason Eckart from the United States, plus a bunch of Elizabethans, including Thomas Weelkes, whom we heard earlier.

The Song Company were the singers, their director is Roland Pealman, and before that we heard Les Murray himself reading Bats' Ultrasound.